PBS Gears Site to Preschool Children

Small children are fighting their parents for the mouse these days. Pretty soon they’ll demand their own laptops and want money to spend on their own music and web sites.

PBS has launched a site that’s currently in beta, called PBS Kids Play. It’s geared for children ages 3 to 6. There are educational games and activities to teach math, science, literacy and language development.

The site won’t have ads (although there will be messages from sponsors) but will make money with a subscription-based model.

The site will have a pre-school and kindergarten curriculum and feature popular PBS characters including Curious George and Bob the Builder. You can sign up for a free trial though it’s unclear how long the trial lasts. A subscription will cost $9.95 a month, or $79 a year. There won’t be chat or interaction between kids.

They have progress reports, and thankfully, parents can limit how long children can access the site.

Update: I recently got an email from Ben Grimley, who is the senior director of PBS Interactive. He assured me that PBS KIDS PLAY! does not have sponsorship messages or ads. The site launched on March 18, 2008.

http://www.beagooddad.com/ Mike

We’ve used the games on pbskids.org for ages now and the kids love it. The games, graphics and sound for the new site looks pretty impressive.

I have a couple concerns about this new project,though.

What is the difference between ads and a message from the sponsor and if they are taking money from sponsors it seems strange to also take money from users. But I guess that is a pretty normal PBS business model since they do that for their TV programs, too.

I also just checked and saw that this new pbskidsplay.org requires you to use IE on Windows and install some kind of executable. Not really a big deal but people not running Windows should probably be aware of that before getting their kids excited to go play the games.